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New products can deliver first year energy savings of at least 20%, even in legacy data centres

London, United Kingdom (PRWEB UK)30 November 2011

DatacenterDynamics: Concurrent Thinking, the UK’s most innovative provider of Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) products, launches its new solution for energy management at the UK’s leading peer-led data centre conference.

Concurrent Thinking’s concurrentCOMMANDTM and concurrentCONTROLTM products offer a comprehensive, easy-to-use and fully scalable solution for optimising the performance of both the physical infrastructure of the data centre and the IT systems operating within it. They provide capabilities for monitoring and managing power at the distribution board, PDU and server level (including power capping); support for environmental sensors; out-of-band server health monitoring; and even OS deployment and performance monitoring.

The new products are designed for all sizes of data centres and are 100% vendor neutral, able to work alongside present-day server and power distribution configurations as well as offering the flexibility and scalability to meet future needs.

Concurrent Thinking CTO, Michael Rudgyard, explained the rationale behind their solution: “Our products monitor all aspects of the data centre, offering powerful and intuitive tools for identifying potential energy inefficiencies – whether these relate to high overheads in power and cooling, or stem from poor IT utilisation by server, rack, customer or application. Where appropriate, user-defined responses or policies can then be actioned in an automatic or semi-automatic fashion. While this approach promises very high levels of energy efficiency in state-of-the-art facilities, real cost savings are also possible in legacy data centres by identifying relatively small changes across multiple aspects of DC operations. Our goal is to offer a 20% saving within the first 12 months for all of our customers, and a complete return on investment in the same period.”

Michael added: “Looking forward, we are also starting to see significant consolidation in the data centre industry. As future data centres grow larger and larger, energy management will become even more critical.

"This drives our strategy to create an automated DCIM platform that is architecting for the demands of the next generation scale-out data centre.”

Concurrent’s DCIM solution is delivered on hardware ‘appliances’ in order to provide a scalable infrastructure, as well as for ease of configuration, upgrade and support.

concurrentCOMMANDTM is a 1U appliance that delivers a powerful web 2.0 interface, putting comprehensive, real-time data at the user’s fingertips. It enables data centre operators to define their own metrics to chart the efficiency of their core IT services – for example capturing CPU usage per watt or IOPS per watt – as well as supporting chargeback of energy use at a user or departmental level.

concurrentCONTROLTM is a discrete 0U appliance that can be deployed in anything from one to thousands of racks. Each device supports up to 16 wired sensors and two Ethernet networks. It is responsible for collecting and processing information on the physical environment, server health and IT utilisation before delivering consolidated data to the concurrentCOMMANDTM platform.

Andy Lawrence, Research Director for Datacenter Technologies at The 451 Group, commented: “Concurrent Thinking’s new DCIM products take an holistic approach to energy efficiency management in the data centre, crossing the boundaries of IT, server, facilities and building management. Its products monitor information from multiple sources and then provide reporting and management tools that can pin-point or effect potential savings. Concurrent Thinking takes a novel, vendor-neutral approach to data centre energy management that draws upon its founder’s deep expertise in managing resource intensive, large scale high performance systems. This launch comes at a critical point as the market for DCIM products is predicted to grow rapidly in 2012.”

Concurrent Thinking is the only UK data centre software business to receive direct investment from Carbon Trust Investments, a not-for-profit company with a mission to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy. Peter Linthwaite, Managing Partner of CT Investment Partners which advises Carbon Trust Investments, said: "Concurrent Thinking's integrated, scalable, easy-to-use technology combines power control with server and operating system management. This results in a significant return on investment for customers as it reduces total cost of ownership, while simultaneously reducing their facility's carbon emissions. Carbon Trust Investments is delighted to be backing a UK business that is poised for rapid growth and will make a meaningful difference to cutting the ICT sector’s carbon emissions."

For detailed information about the capabilities of Concurrent Thinking’s products, visit http://www.concurrent-thinking.com or Stand 86 at DatacenterDynamics London 2011.

About Concurrent Thinking
Based in Warwick, UK, and a spin-out of Warwick University, Concurrent Thinking aims to bring new concepts and solutions to the converging HPC and data centre markets. The company was founded by Michael Rudgyard, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Allinea Software Ltd. (a world-wide leader in scalable tools for HPC applications). Concurrent Thinking is an investee company of Carbon Trust Investments Limited.